And the headdesk moment of the week goes to Los Alamitos Unified School District, who recently decided that teachers in the school district would have to prove that their curricula have political balance when teaching controversial subjects, including global warming. Reminiscent of the creation of the universe debacles, teachers will now be required to teach “opposing views” because conservative board members are “concerned that ‘liberal’ faculty members could skew lessons on global warming”, according to local news coverage.

This could potentially become a dangerous trend, considering that several other districts, including the Texas board of education and South Dakota public schools, have taken similar views as well. It might be okay to teach climate skepticism if it indeed was taught and identified as climate misinformation that industries deliberately use to confuse the public, not as just a “dissenting opinion”. However this doesn’t appear to be the case here. Just listen to what one of the school board members has to say:

“I believe my role is to represent the conservative voice of the community, and I’m not a big fan of global warming. Most teachers are left to center, and if we leave it to teachers to impose their liberal views, then it would make for an unbalanced lesson. Some people believe that global warming is a crock of crap, and others are zealots,” said Jeffrey Barke who, when not practicing for his future career as a Fox News anchor, also sits on the school board.

They seem to forget that 98% of respectable climate scientists agree that climate change is happening and is driven by human influences. Not only that, but the majority of Americans understand climate change is real and also believe it’s man-made, although apparently we’ve identified that the minority reside on the Los Alamitos Unified school board.

“Our goal is to have every high school student complete at least one AP course, and this is a good one to take because it is not heavily math-based,” said Assistant Superintendent Sherry Kropp.

Clearly, because if it was based on math, students could find that actual equations prove earth’s climate has been put on steroids, and it’s because we’re spewing billions of tons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas pollution into the atmosphere everyday, for the past century. It’s not rocket science, it’s a simple calculation that shows that energy in (from the sun) ≠energy out (back into space) on our planet.

“We define a topic to be controversial if it has more than one widely held view,” said Kropp, “There are many issues regarding the environment that have become politicized these days and we want kids to be exposed to all sides. An unbalanced lesson would portray only one side. All we want is to have teachers teach the various scientific theories out there.”

This would be a nice sentiment if there were legitimate various scientific theories out there, but the industry-backed, Koch-fueled, conservative manifesto that currently exists as an opposing political view is not synonymous with being an opposing scientific theory.

This is why science is inherently not a political issue. Everyone wants to debate politics, and there are always multiple political approaches to a problem. The reason there shouldn’t be a debate on climate change anymore is because the debate happened decades ago, between rational, legitimate scientists. Yet skeptics and dirty energy industry apologists still demand a “debate” today, long after the science has been settled.

If this were an education-themed metaphor, it would be like that student who waltzes into class 15 minutes late only to start asking questions about a topic that was thoroughly covered 15 minutes ago, when class actually started, and yet is still surprised and affronted when everyone in class, including the teacher, looks at him like he’s a total dunce.

The difference between science and religion is clearly distinguishable (except maybe in Texas), and now the distinction between science and politics must also be reviewed, all thanks to wingnut school boards.

Sure, discuss opposing political views in a policy class, or debate club, but not in science class, where politics should have no presence. The intelligent design issue went all the way to the courts, and it took a judge to finally nix it as an opposing scientific theory. Let’s not let climate change become the next “intelligent design” controversy.

As for the Los Alamitos school board, no phone calls were returned to answer whether they would also be requiring alternate views on such controversial subjects as gravity, how babies are made, or whether or not the moon was made of cheese.

Previous Comments

From the article you link to: ‘Before Los Alamitos High School science teachers can tackle topics such as global warming, they will have to demonstrate to the school board that the course is politically balanced.’

That seems eminently sensible to me. The climate issue is dominated by political iniatives such as the IPCC and countless pressure groups and vested interests pushing for policy changes and dramatic changes of lifestyle. In such a politically highly-charged situation, school pupils are targets for indoctrination, and deserve all the protection that that school boards can provide for them.

Indoctrination? Its called science. As Bill Maher said, since its science, non scientists dont get to vote. Maybe we should also vote on whether the internet and nuclear energy and the internal combustion engine and space travel are valid science.

Assistant Superintendent Sherry Kropp is right. There are two sides. Those on the side of life and those who are not. Those in the real world of science reason and facts and those who think they can wish them away.

This is *exactly* the problem with climate science. They are basing their claims on consensus and that consensus is *not* even based on repeatedly failed attempts over decades to falsify a theory, but upon repeated funding driven attempts to prop it up within the most highly politicized field that has ever existed.

I see you are also on here *defending* the practice of withholding of data even in the face of FOIA requests. In what other field do FOIA requests even come up? None, because only in climatology is data withheld after publication of an article that relies on that data.

Why are misleading readers about public opinion? Public opinion trends are what matter and your side of the debate is in huge trouble since you neglected to clean your own house by shaming the hockey stick team and the now notorious IPCC. You lost the whole country of England in 2010 due to the coldest winter in 120 years, and the second coldest in 330 years.

“Clearly, because if it was based on math, students could find that actual equations prove earth’s climate has been put on steroids”

Uh, you forgot to link to a writeup on those equations. Oh, you mean greenhouse theory. What about water vapor feedback tripling the greenhouse effect as claimed by computer models. Can you prove that too with schoolhouse math? I don’t think you can. Can you add the effect of clouds to your penciled page of simple math? Do show!

Don’t you have kind of a conflict of interest here? If that chart of growing skepticism keeps rising (as temperatures keep refusing to surge http://oi51.tinypic.com/34qjmgn.jpg and sea levels refuse to surge http://oi56.tinypic.com/11jsp5i.jpg) might your research funding be abruptly cut off?

When you are losing even serious left wing intellectuals, I suspect you might be a bit late for the billion dollar party:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n92YenWfz0Y

It pains me to have Creationist Republicans as friends in the battle to restore integrity to science, but better the religion I know than this new doomsday religion. As a Ph.D. chemist (Columbia/Harvard) I always had a sort of chuckling view of climatology, but when I discovered that peer review was broken in that field and that lying with statistics was common, I felt very sad, and very mad.

I’m not mad at you though. I’m sad for you. I hope there is some useful resolution to this mess.

For someone with a PhD, you surely don’t know what you are talking about. The winters of 2009/2010 and 2010/2011 weren’t even close to being the “second coldest”. Take 2009/2010: second coldest since 1978/1979. Maybe 2010/2011 then? Oops, warmer than 2009/2010…

And what did this do with the opinion of the British about climate change?

Nothing. No-thing. Climategate, IPCC errors, and cold winters, and the British are still convinced there is climate change and that it is a threat, and more than 2/3rd still consider humans the main cause of that climate change.

It pains me to see yet another PhD unable to look up some very, very, very basic facts. Perhaps we may need to check the articles on which your PhD is based. Be assured that any missing data will be claimed to be an attempt by you to hide something and loudly proclaimed to be evidence of fraud and manipulation.

Oh, I see, you don’t have a Ph.D. or a research program, nor any publications that I an find. I didn’t know what an “adjunct” professor was. You’re an instructor who did a masters at Columbia. You don’t have a research program to lose funding for. Sorry, I stand corrected. You’ll be fine then. There’s plenty of world saving to do outside of CO2 panic. I was honestly worried about the fate of a snappy young tenure track professor during what I predict is to be a massive de-funding of climate science in favor of research that actually saves lives.

I guess you didn’t continue with chemistry at Columbia, but maybe you know of my favorite alpha male scientist, Ron Bresow, former president of the American Chemical Society or my old lab mate in the Katz group who is now Dept. of Chemistry chairman, Colin Nuckolls. I still live two blocks down from Tom’s Diner (where James Hansen has his office, above) in a rent stabilized apartment my girlfriend at the time nabbed for us. She’s now Google’s senior AdWords attorney in NYC, and also has a Ph.D. in chemistry.

I have a quick quaint video of the Gilbert Stork that I made, the best organic chemist I’ve ever met, who after helping invent The Pill, built the chemistry department into what it is today, now linked to the new towering Interdisciplinary Science Building. Here he is, last year, describing the contents of a vial he keeps in a Stork Club ashtray on his desk which is the very first molecule he ever made:

Now you know who one of us evil water-vapor-amplified-(while ignoring uncertainty in cloud cover effects) runaway-greenhouse-theory deniers is: a guy in pajamas with a purring cat in his lap who has become a reluctant activist on his own time and on his own dime since in his opinion one field of science has gone rogue. No other field is so reliant for its very existence as a Big Science concern on the validity of such an extreme and speculative theory, and no other field I know of lacks the classic practice of attempting to falsify its latest leading theories. This lack of internal skepticism is what birthed the skeptical movement, I suggest.

In what other field do FOIA requests even come up? None, because only in climatology is data withheld after publication of an article that relies on that data.

###############
The only data supposedly “withheld” were data that could not be redistributed per the nondisclosure agreements that the CRU scientists had to sign to get said data. If the individuals issuing FOIA requests were really interested in getting that data (as opposed to just harassing overworked scientists), they would have done exactly what the CRU scientists did – they would have gone to actual owners of the data and obtained the data themselves after signing the same nondisclosure agreements that the CRU scientists had to sign. Then they would have performed their own independent data analysis and come up with their own global-average temperature estimates to compare with the CRU’s (or NASA’s) results.

But that would require a level of honesty and competence far beyond what most climate “skeptics” are capable of mustering.

Climate-science data are more open and freely available than are data in almost any other branch of science. If climate “skeptics” weren’t so darned lazy, incompetent, and dishonest, they would have been performing their own independent analyses of the *mountains* of climate-science data freely available to them instead of filing frivolous FOIA requests.

In fact, I was able to replicate NASA’s land-temperature results very closely in just over a period of just days in my spare time, using publicly-available *raw* data and free, open-source software development tools. Here are my results compared to NASA’s official results: http://img689.imageshack.us/img689/6175/caerbannogvnasalandinde.jpg

IOW, I was able to accomplish more in my free time over a period of just a few days than most “skeptics” have been able to accomplish in *years*.

Furthermore, I didn’t have to file a single FOIA request to get all the information that I needed to confirm NASA’s results.

The bottom line is, the people who have been hassling scientists with those frivolous FOIA requests are lazy, incompetent hacks who would have no idea what to do with the mountains of free climate-science data already available to them.

Great work! NASA’s GISS global average is fine with me as a complement to the others.

If the End of the World is at stake, then the lawyering up at CRU is just silly. You are just another person DEFENDING data withholding!! It’s not defensible. The very idea of it is so foreign to me as a trained scientist that it boggles my mind and your own side’s defense of it motivates me to defeat you in the battle for public opinion since you are not on the side of good science, period. The “nondisclosure agreement” story doesn’t even pass the laugh test given that Phil Jones wrote:

“…don’t leave stuff lying around on ftp sites – you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone.”

Those are NOT the words of a man constrained by nondisclosure agreements!

When WL released the gun camera footage which was asked for under FOIA and refused, you were REALLY pissed off.

When a FOIA request from someone NOT paying the taxes that went in part to the CRU for data the CRU didn’t have and was already available, you suddenly forget all about your hate of WL and start talking bullshit.

Those who follow the Creationism controversy are familiar with the boilerplate state bills that call for teaching the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolutionary theory. These bills are aimed specifically at evolution, but to support their claim that they are not, most of the bills state that other “controversial theories” such as the chemical origin of life, human cloning, and … global warming are included in the realm of theories to be countered. Although there may be differences in motivation in the denial of these different subjects, there is an ideological commonality.

Maybe parents should send their kids to Catholic school. We teach real science—not creationism or denialism. Science is the search for truth, and the Catholic Church supports that quest.

http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_academies/acdscien/

The Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences just finished a workshop on the melting of glaciers and plans to have more workshops on climate change. One of the scientists who helped organize the meeting is in the AP Environmental Science book-Dr. Ramanathan. He is famous for his research on Asia’s brown cloud.

Here is my most recent article about the Pontifical Academy’s workshop.

Don’t believe what the fake “Real Catholic” site on the Internet claims the Catholic Church says about climate change. They are trying to make people think that climate change is anti-Catholic. They have a cartoon “shadow priest” on the site. He is all black like a shadow, so you can’t see his face. Probably he is not a priest but only a cartoon. They even told Catholics not to give their parish money if the pastor discussed environmental issues during Easter season.

This so-called “Real Catholic” site is not on board with the Vatican position. The “Real Catholic” site even has something called CIA–something like “Catholic Information Agency.” This makes it seem like the Central Intelligence Agency, tho’ they have a tiny disclaimer.

In any case, the CIA says climate change is happening. They even have a Center for Climate Change and National Security. According to media reports, the CIA Center is headed by Larry Kobayashi.

The Vatican is where Catholics get the official view, and what the Vatican thinks about the science of climate change is not a secret that gets revealed on some cheesy Internet site. The Vatican doesn’t give out its views via a faceless “shadow priest”; they have a Pope.

Go to the Vatican site and read what the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy says: climate change is happening.

The Academicians of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences do not accept the conspiracy theory that climate scientists are greedy liars who are trying to “trick” people. For the conspiracist perspective, see global warming denialists such as Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, Texas Congressman Joe Barton, Virginia’s Attorney General Cucccinelli, Lord Christopher Monckton, the Cato Institute, or the masters of the Kremlin. In early 2010, Russia’s President Medvedev also called global warming a tricky campaign, but he seems to have backtracked from that postion since the summer forest fires of 2010.

The Russian physicist Roald Sagdeev is a member of the Pontifical Academy of sciences. He is one of the scientists who signed the open letter in defense of the climate research. I have posted a number of articles about Dr. Sagdeev. Now he is in Maryland.

Virginia’s Attorney General Cuccinelli, who persecutes the climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann, cites a news article from the Kremlin’s official press agency RIA Novosti in his attack on the EPA; but he doesn’t consider the perspective of one of Russia’s greatest scientists, Roald Sagdeev, the first Soviet scientist to be a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

When Dr. Sagdeev lived in the former U.S.S.R., he bravely published a 1987 letter in Izvestia that distanced the Soviet Academy of Sciences from the KGB’s campaign to spread the lie that the U.S. Army made AIDS to kill blacks.

Acording to The New York Times (11-7-87):

“Soviet scientists have disavowed charges in the Soviet-sponsored press that the AIDS virus was artificially cultivated at a secret American military base.

The scientists, Roald Sagdeyev and Vitali Goldansky, publicly distanced the Soviet Academy of Sciences from the accusations about American responsibility for acquired immune deficiency syndrome. They said they had protested the appearance of Soviet articles that repeated those contentions.

The disavowal was contained in Izvestia, the Soviet government newspaper…”

Dr. Sagdeev is one of my heroes because he spoke on behalf of less powerful Soviet scientists who probably were afraid to challenge the KGB propaganda about AIDS. Dr. Sagdeev defended reason and science instead of pseudo-scientific propaganda that served the regime’s political agenda instead of scientific progress. Indeed, the Soviet regime’s official ideology, Marxism-Leninism, was a pseudo-scientific ideology that masqueraded as science.

In 1992, KGB chief Yevgeni Primakov finally admitted that the KGB had spread this propaganda:

The Russian newspaper Izvestiya (3-19-92) reported on March 19, 1992:

“[Primakov] mentioned the well known articles printed a few years ago in our central newspapers about AIDS supposedly originating from secret Pentagon laboratories. According to Yevgeni Primakov, the articles exposing US scientists’ ‘crafty’ plots were fabricated in KGB offices.”

The homepage of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences has some interesting recent scientific articles. Wikipedia has a good description of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and identifies the current Academicians by country. I would not be surprised if some Nobel-winning climate scientists, who are constantly hounded by the Denialist Party, are someday invited to become members of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences because they aren’t just outstanding scientists, they are outstanding defenders of God’s creation.

So now you are equipped to render a psychiatric diagnosis about my sanity over the Internet as well as expertise on climate science?

I am not the one who was left high and dry when the Kremlin line changed. I am not the one who believed what was dished up by Andrei Illarionov’s IEA on the very day that the EPA ruled that CO2 was a pollutant and instantly disseminated by the Gazprom operative Alisher Usmanov’s Kommersant and the Russian government’s RIA Novosti.

Attorney General Cuccinelli, whose dad is a career lobbyist for the natural gas industry, cites the news article from RIA Novosti–the Russian government’s official press agency–even though Russian scientists have distanced themselves from the IEA report.

Russia’s top climate scientist Bedritsky has distanced Russian scientists from Illarionov’s much cited report, has noted that Illarionov is not a scientist, and has observed that Illarionov works for the Cato Insititute.

Illarionov is also is a former adviser to Putin (see Kommersant) and used to work for the late Victor Chernomyrdin, the former head of the Soviet Gas Ministry and it’s post-Soviet reincarnation Gazprom.

Here is the NYT (2-23-11) quoting the Russian scientist Alexander Bedritskiy about the IEA report:

QUOTEBEGINS
Alexander Bedritskiy, president of the World Meteorological Organization and the top climate change adviser to President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia, said that the Russian report was thoroughly discredited by top scientists in his country more than a year ago.

“Any scientific discussion on the results, pretending to be science-based, does not make sense,” Dr. Bedritskiy said in an e-mail.

He also noted that the author of that report, Andrei Illarionov, is not a climate scientist but an economist with the Cato Institute, a conservative research group in the United States.

Mr. Cuccinelli could not say how he had verified the accuracy of the report, which is written in Russian, but said that his legal complaint had been “heavily researched.” The research did not consist of consultations with scientists, however, he said.

“We have to have a certain understanding of our context to operate, but that doesn’t require expert witnesses,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/science/earth/23virginia.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=science

On the other hand, because they want to sell their liquified natural gas in the US, Gazprom officials are saying that fracking will be bad for our water.

The point is, the Russians are trying to sell gas. If science isn’t on their side, they will spread anti-science. If the science is on their side, they will spread that.

The Russians study climate change because climate change is going to impact their fossil fuel industry and agriculture. It is going to cause more severe floods and forest fires. It is going to cause mass migrations that will affect Russia.

Even the FSB (KGB) studies this and the results are openly reported in the Russian media. Here is an article by a very prominent Russia expert who has worked for the CIA, other agencies of the US government, and universities about Russian views on climate change. http://windowoneurasia.blogspot.com/2010/03/window-on-eurasia-moscow-views-climate.html

Oh, I thought you had just copy/pasted some odd bit of nonsense into this boring thread so I figured I could wittily use it as an excuse to post my new astronaut graphic which I couldn’t remember if I had posted here before due to massive ingestion of beer, overnight, and now it’s noon, even. You wrote all that stuff on the fly? Where the heck did *you* come from? You can crank out all that diamond-sharp prose with no mistakes at all in a minute or two? O.K. For me it takes longer.

“Whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet. Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgement, than for that city. Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.” - Jesus

I can’t follow your Russian conspiracy theory material right now. But the gist of your claim is that something will happen in the future. I know the sun will come up, more or less 100 years from now, but beyond that?

I am currently rapidly devouring The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Gibbon, half way through volume 1 of 3. So if you want to understand me, I’m just a bookworm with Machiavellian tendencies based on the idea that a few “pictures are worth a thousand words” graphics posted to the Internet, daily, might not so much change opinion but WAKEPEOPLEUP.

You are not frothing at the mouth angry like the usual cookie cutter AGW enthusiast. I wonder what you think of those angry folk. Do you think about people at all in the normal social sense?

Do you have a sense of humor?

I love Russia. My last lover was born in Moscow. She was half Korean.

I don’t like that you use so many calls to authority rather than just spit out what the heck you really think about things. You rely too much on certain phases like “anti-science” without defining them well either via context or by direct definition.

A little more effort at effective communication with us mere mortals would be highly appreciated.

If you really are a Ph.D I wonder if Atkins would recognise that as such.

‘I always had a sort of chuckling view of climatology, but when I discovered that peer review was broken in that field and that lying with statistics was common, I felt very sad, and very mad.’

Climatology, and its many disciplines is tough science. Those who collect the data suffer hazards and discomfort and even privation to provide the nuts and bolts. Do you think such would discredit their reputations by engaging in malfeasance. That is best left to those gone-emeritus or about to.

Peer review is fine and only research findings with problems get dropped. Those that have complained about peer review need to complete some real science, science that deals with all the relevant data and not just cherries.

Michael Mann lied with statistics, effectively, if not on purpose. So did Keith Briffa. I have to call my lawyers if I am to say anything more in a public forum.

“Do you think such would discredit their reputations by engaging in malfeasance.”

I honestly don’t understand it except to say that I do not think the hockey sticks that established Global Warming as a big deal were at all legitimate.

Mann’s ‘98 one used only 100 years to “center” his principle component analysis and that caused certain individual proxy records to be weighed about 400X more than they should have been.

Result?

http://oi51.tinypic.com/ou4jeu.jpg

Please don’t scream at me if I didn’t link to the perfect graph of it.

It turned from a hockey stick in to a bowl.

Briffa’s most famous hockey stick relied on decade long withheld data that had a bunch of noisy data plus a SINGLE outlier tree labelled YAD061:

http://oi54.tinypic.com/2elgu50.jpg

http://oi53.tinypic.com/dptlr4.jpg

Lately it turns out he didn’t just “hide the recent decline” but also a decade or two of very early tree ring data that didn’t match the instrumental record of temperature, basically all the pink, here:

http://oi54.tinypic.com/106yo2c.jpg

Then Mann came out with a hockey stick that threw out all individual tree rings that failed to match the instrumental (global average, not the actual local temperature either) record. Since tree ring data is so noisy it spit out a hockey stick, automatically, just as noisy random data did too! It was algorithmic cherry picking. That’s not fraud, it’s just kindergarten science.

Then there is Eric Steig’s Nature journal cover article that spread peninsula warming out over the whole continent. That was rapidly debunked, but alas, news stories were based upon it.

http://oi54.tinypic.com/2wcdt89.jpg

Who is Atkins? The diet guy? The P. Chem. textbook writer who has become a religiously intense atheist?

…who can’t do anything but repeat the overhyped claims of one Steve McIntyre. Did you pay any attention at all? I know he hid it well, but Steve was kind enough to show the updated data from the Russian group that owned the Yamal data ((I’ll get back to that), which confirmed the Briffa reconstruction.

Are you also aware that the owners of the Yamal data actually sent McIntyre the data when he asked? No data hidden at all, merely Steve McIntyre lying by omission, and his accolytes still defending him when he finally admitted he had the data all along.

Tell me, NikFromNYC, what would your big friends in academia do when they give you their data for your project, and you then just decide to spread it all around? I can tell you what they do: they’ll shun you and call you names. Briffa was kind enough to forward McIntyre’s request to the data owners. McIntyre was vile enough to attack Briffa for years for falsely claiming Briffa did not want to give him *his* data, as he already knew it wasn’t up to Briffa to hand over that data.

Or take McIntyre’s latest attack on Briffa:
http://moyhu.blogspot.com/2011/03/keith-briffa-and-renaissance.html
Do read the comments, it shows how page restrictions of a journal can make a group of ideologically outraged people throw another tantrum over the little speck of dust the cleaner forgot. In the meantime, one Richard Lindzen is revered by the same group, despite his ‘accidental’ selection of just those time periods which give the desired answer. Or Roy Spencer writing a book in which he uses five fit parameters, none of which are restrained to any real-life estimate-based extent. McShane & Wyner then? Heavily defended by ‘The Auditors’ even despite the fact it made various false claims about Mann’s work (amongst many other questionable issues).

Bad idea. McI’s stats were wrong, and seriously cherry-picked (1%), and then Wegman & co just used the same stuff, well covered by DC: http://deepclimate.org/2010/11/16/replication-and-due-diligence-wegman-style/

HBGary want pots of money. Money that the fossil fuel industry have in abundance (http://climateprogress.org/2011/04/26/halliburton-profits-oil/) but is in rather shorter supply for climate research.

And as opposed to your drivel, you can check the sources and find that, unlike your fact-free diatribes, there is actual evidence available to support my words. If the words are true, it doesn’t matter if they have been paid for.

caerb it is quite evident to anyone who even occaisionally glances here that “In fact, I was able to replicate NASA’s land-temperature results very closely in just over a period of just days in my spare time, using publicly-available *raw* data and free, open-source software development tools. ” evidently it doesnt impress anyone. not the fact that you were able to nor its implications. i think you can stop posting the same thing over and over.
nik, you are on the wrong site if you are trying to convince anyone that there may be scientific fraud. no matter what is said they go back to the same ol same ol.
Laurel, why does the 2% number reek? it can’t be possible that I know all of the 2%, can it?

I’ll keep posting my results as long as it is necessary to remind lurkers of the ineptitude and dishonesty of the deniers who keep making the same discredited claims about the surface temperature record “over and over”.

The bottom line is, you deniers have made a bunch of unsupported claims about the surface temperature record, claims that a competent programmer can easily disprove with just a couple of days of effort, as I have demonstrated. And I’ll keep reminding people of that simple fact. Deal with it.

so what is an outlier anyway? is saying 98% one? maybe because you prefaced it with “respectable” it isnt one?

so anyhow, no debate. no questioning. take it on …. faith? because where is the proof? where are the models showing us this cooling trend anyway? does the ‘hotspot’ not matter anymore? or was that explained away with some radiosande bs?
but no, we dont need to teach anything but the glory to be in believing in the postulate.

Nick from NY is full of the ususal memes from the littany of false denier claims, ie. Hockey stick? Have you any idea how many times it has been validated by other reconstructions? I suppose it means nothing to you that the National Academy of Science has endorsed it. Of course not, they are part of the conspiracy too, right?

Still believe that one Nick? You are years behind on facts.

Next well hear that Al Gore is fat, so AGW must be a hoax.

Rum
“does the ‘hotspot’ not matter anymore?”

It never did matter, since it isnt a signiture of AGW, but would result from ANY forcing that causes warming.

It is you who have “belief”, since your position is not supported by the science.

I dont see why students should not be informed of the ways that politics, economics and ideology (whether idealist or materialist, religious or scientistic) feed into ostensibly “scientific” debates, on both sides of issues. (They should also be informed that, since no-one has invented a better system, the scientific method with peer-review of findings etc is the best one we have, and that scientific consensus should be afforded considerable, if not absolute, credence.) So there should perhaps be a short time devoted to outlining the case (with all its limitations) for (eg) Creationism, global warming denial, flat earthism etc, as well as a much longer time outlining the case for evolution and anthropogenic global warming. Such philosophically and sociologically informed debates, referencing Kuhn, Feyerabend and whoever, would be much more educational than using students as ammunition in broader cultural wars.

“is not able to explain the observed rapid growth rates, which suggests the presence of additional trace vapours in the aerosol chamber,”

“Some indications were also found for the accelerator beam timing and intensity to influence the aerosol particle formation rate at the highest experimental SO2 cncentrations of 6 ppb, although none was found at lower concentrations.”

“However in order to quantify the conditions under which ion processes become significant, improvements are needed in controlling the experimental variables and in the reproducibility of the experiments. Finally, concerning technical aspects, the most important lessons for the CLOUD design include the stringent requirement of internal cleanliness of the aerosol chamber, as well as maintenance of extremely stable temperatures (variations below 0.1C).”

“During the 4-week run, around 50 nucleation bursts were produced and recorded”

50 over a 4 week run! My goodness!

Now, how is that supposed to cause climate change?

PS note how denialists insist that CO2 IS A TRACEGAS therefore can’t have any effect, but the even more trace cosmic rays do.

Nice try. Compared to the huge flaws and gaps in the failed AGW/CO2 theory, those are extremely minor issues.

But as always, The alarmists will pretend they are signifigant and totally ignore the enormouse holes their pet theories.
Because it is and alwasy has been a political movement.
Facts are merely incedental to a warmist.

but not understanding biology isn’t much harder than not understanding physics.

CO2 isn’t a plant food. If it were, why aren’t the plants taking it all up? Are they full or something? And why do farmers put fertiliser on their plants, rather than just CO2?

Because CO2 isn’t plant food.

If CO2 is a trace gas, how can it affect plant growth?

It’s a trace gas. Therefore it cannot have an effect on plant growth.

And if CO2 can’t have an effect because it’s a trace gas, then cosmic rays being even less evident in the atmosphere than CO2 can have no effect either.

And the flaws and holes in the “GCRs are doing it!” are as you admit truly massive:

1) clouds need water more than they need CCNs. What’s making all the water?!?!
2) why aren’t there more clouds to explain the temperature trend?!?!
3) why is it warming but clouds increase albedo by being shinier than the ground?!?!
4) why is the temperature trend almost entirely explained by the CO2 concentrations when it is actually the GCRs which aren’t trending correctly?!?!

But you have no understanding of the science, only what you’ve been told to say by the echo chamber.

Efforts to anticipate how climate change will affect future food availability can benefit from understanding the impacts of changes to date. Here, we show that in the cropping regions and growing seasons of most countries, with the important exception of the United States, temperature trends for 1980–2008 exceeded one standard deviation of historic year-to-year variability. Models that link yields of the four largest commodity crops to weather indicate that global maize and wheat production declined by 3.8% and 5.5%, respectively, compared to a counterfactual without climate trends. For soybeans and rice, winners and losers largely balanced out. Climate trends were large enough in some countries to offset a significant portion of the increases in average yields that arose from technology, CO2 fertilization, and other factors.

Oh, sorry, only that which is fact is alarmism to those in deep denial.

PS what flaws/gaps in AGW/CO2 theory? In fact, what AGW/CO2 theory? There’s only climate science. And that explains the past climate and current climate. The explanation of the current climate is that CO2 rises are causing warming, just as they have done in the past, with no more and no less effect than it had then.

It’s the deniers who insist that CO2 knows whether it was human produced and decides that it won’t absorb IR radiation.

Sorry… I should not have called AGW a theory.
it does not rate that. It is merely a hypothesis.
And a weak one.
What holes? Where have you been?

The hot spot- non existant.
The Surface temp record corrupted.
The Hokey Schtick completley discredited.
The Models unable to predict anything accruately.
10 years of not warming while CO2 continues to rise steadily.
Sea level rising at the same rate as the last 10,000 years and now slowing.
Climategate, Glaciergate, amozongate, all the other gates.
The recent cloud experiments at CERN showing solar activity have the majority share of control over the climate.
The poor corrolateion of CO2 to temps along side the near perfect corrolation of ENSO to temps.
The saturation effect of CO2 concentrations.
Good Grief, the above is only what came to mind in a couple of minutes.

The poor AGW scam has been so compleatly shot full of holes it is simply a joke now.
No other scientific theory in history has been so discredited and kepta following like this scam. Which proves as well as anything else that it is more religion than science.

And the consequence of the climate science is that human production of billions of tons of CO2 a year is causing the climate to warm when all other primary forcings would have us cooling.

“What holes? Where have you been?”

Funny. As you’ll see in a moment:

“The hot spot- non existant.”

Where have you been?David Evans and the ‘hot spot’.

<—quote—>

Dr David Evans: born-again ‘alarmist’?
Posted on 10 August 2008 by Barry Brook

A few weeks ago, self-proclaimed “rocket scientist”, Dr David Evans, wrote an Opinion Editorial in The Australian, which was widely circulated across various email distribution lists (I got send the link a couple of times, asking whether what he was saying was valid. I passed them on to these two pieces from Deltoid). But it spawned a life of its own in the non-greenhouse theorist blogosphere, and also drummed up strong support among other Op Ed writers, which have also been thoroughly dissected.

In particular, Dr Evans made some very strong statements about the robustness of climate science, including the claim that there was a missing hotspot in the tropical atmosphere, which therefore invalidated the greenhouse theory (and therefore presumably required the development of a new branch of physics). For instance, Dr Evans said:

If there is no hot spot then an increased greenhouse effect is not the cause of global warming. So we know for sure that carbon emissions are not a significant cause of the global warming. If we had found the greenhouse signature then I would be an alarmist again.

However, Dr Evans must have been unaware that: (1) the hotspot was not a signature of the greenhouse effect – it is a signature of warming from any source, and (2) that the hotspot is not actually missing…

<—endquote—>

Lional A has posted time and time again about the “hot spot” and you are so deep in denial you haven’t read it.

Temperature trend estimates vary according to site classification, with poor siting leading to an overestimate of minimum temperature trends and an underestimate of maximum temperature trends, resulting in particular in a substantial difference in estimates of the diurnal temperature range trends. The opposite-signed differences of maximum and minimum temperature trends are similar in magnitude, so that the overall mean temperature trends are nearly identical across site classifications.

Because if CO2 which is available in several orders of magnitude greater numbers than GCRs can only have a 1.2C effect on temperatures when doubled (and we’ve increased that by 35% rather than 100%, which means that there HAS to be a positive feedback of nearly 3:1), then the GCRs which have varied by a fraction of a percent and only exist five or more orders of magnitude smaller in number can only have a:

Democracy is utterly dependent upon an electorate that is accurately informed. In promoting climate change denial (and often denying their responsibility for doing so) industry has done more than endanger the environment. It has undermined democracy.

There is a vast difference between putting forth a point of view, honestly held, and intentionally sowing the seeds of confusion. Free speech does not include the right to deceive. Deception is not a point of view. And the right to disagree does not include a right to intentionally subvert the public awareness.